Surf--and Hope--Are Up in Rio de Janeiro Slum : Brazil: Program teaches sport to poor children. But tight budget leaves youths at competitive disadvantage.

Fefi’s old, rebuilt surfboard is out of commission at the moment, but his surfer aspirations endure. “My dream is to go professional,” he says with quiet determination.

For this 13-year-old boy, that won’t be easy. To use a metaphor from another sport, Fefi has two strikes against him. In fact, if it weren’t for an innovative program called the Surfavela Project, he and about 80 other Rio youths probably wouldn’t be surfing at all.

Surfavela is for boys who live in favelas , Rio’s squalid hillside slums. Those who join the project receive free surfing classes, rebuilt boards and a chance to engage in a sport that otherwise would probably be unaffordable.

Participants scavenge junked boards and rebuild them, sometimes splicing the pieces of two to make one. When rebuilt boards get broken again, as they often do, the Surfavela team again repairs them.

Why do they go to the trouble?

Says founder Vanderlei Paiva Goncalves, who goes by the nickname “Berzo”: “I want to see the youngsters participating here instead of participating in crime.”

*

In the favelas of Rio, children grow up close to the criminal element. Drug trafficking gangs recruit boys to work in cocaine and crack networks. Bloody shootouts between gangs and police are not unusual. “Here children are born seeing crime, violence and guns,” Berzo says.

But Cantagalo children also are born by the beach and grow up watching better-off children surfing the waves. Surfavela lets the poor kids join the fun.

The project’s headquarters and workshop occupy six concrete rooms in the basement of a school and community center serving Cantagalo, a favela that rises behind the luxury apartments and fashionable shops along Ipanema Beach. Fefi is hanging out at the shop with a few other boys on a rainy Rio afternoon.

“I’m not surfing now because my board is broken,” Fefi says. “It’s here in the shop. Otherwise, I’d be at the beach.”

Like Fefi, all the boys in Surfavela go by nicknames. Grumpy is here, and Sucao. They talk about the Surfavela Project with a too-good-to-be-true tone of voice.

Grumpy, a skinny 13-year-old with a serious face and prominent ears, says he has been in the project three months and already has had three old boards to learn on. “I’m not bad now,” he says with suppressed pride.

Besides surfing itself, what the boys like most about Surfavela is Berzo, 33, who is treated like a living patron saint by the favela boys.

“I think Berzo is cool--he gives us things,” Grumpy says with more than a hint of awe.

*

Sucao, 13, has just joined the program and has yet to start surfing, but he already shares the awe. “Berzo is making a board for me,” he says. “I think I can start Monday.”

Berzo grew up poor in Cantagalo, and he still lives on the hill. As a youth, he says, he was one of the favela ‘s first surfers, and he still has the look: lean muscles, uncombed hair, black shorts and a white T-shirt that says “Surf School.” A small dragon tattoo peeks through the hair on his left forearm.

He has held a lot of jobs--deliveryman, office helper, salesman. But love of surfing and his sympathy for poor kids with hard lives led him into his current career as a self-made social worker-cum-coach.

In 1988, Berzo scrounged a few old boards from surfer friends and invited some favela boys to learn the sport. More surfers contributed castoff boards, and more boys joined the program.

Berzo organized tournaments, and the press began taking notice of the novelty. Predominantly black favela boys contrasted sharply with the predominantly white surfers of the middle and upper classes. “Black boys catching waves had never been seen,” Berzo says.

The owner of a surfboard factory showed up and helped start a repair shop, showing Berzo and the Surfavela boys how to rebuild boards. Berzo met the mayor’s son, who helped arrange for a donation of tools from the municipal government.

Today, Surfavela has about 30 participants from Cantagalo and 40 from Rocinha, another favela . Berzo also has allowed about 40 boys from luxury apartments of Ipanema to join, in the belief that mixing among the social classes is desirable.

To help finance the program, and to earn a little spending money for themselves, the boys sell T-shirts decorated with silk-screen designs in the basement shop. The French surfing federation recently sent a donation of 500 T-shirts.

The Washington-based Ashoka Foundation awarded Berzo a fellowship that pays him $700 a month. He says the money is for him and his wife to live on, but he spends much of it on Surfavela expenses. But there never seems to be enough.

“The project right now is in a crisis for lack of money,” Berzo says. The financial pinch is especially painful for favela surfers who have become good enough to compete in state, national and international tournaments but don’t have the funds needed for travel and registration fees.

*

One of the few Surfavela participants who has had the opportunity to score nationally is Fefi’s older brother, Ademilson dos Santos, known as Buxexa. Now 19, Buxexa was runner-up in the Brazilian national championship for boys ages 10 through 14 in 1990.

“He is capable of competing in the world championship circuit,” Berzo says. “He wants to get back into tournament competition, but how? He doesn’t have a sponsor.”

Other Surfavela veterans are in the same situation, and “frustration is hitting them hard,” Berzo says. “That’s why I’m also getting frustrated.”

Promising surfers from the middle and upper classes are able to find sponsors among the numerous surf shops and equipment manufacturers that promote the sport in Brazil. But sponsors usually shy away from dark-skinned favela surfers, Berzo says. They want blond youths for their ads and publicity.

“Businessmen think it isn’t good business to sponsor someone who is associated with favelas ,” he says. “They think black doesn’t sell. So there is racism under the surface.”

Jose Roberto Annibal, a surfer and journalist, agrees.

“There is discrimination,” he says. “Manufacturers only want to sponsor blonds. No one wants to sponsor a black boy.”

Annibal, who writes for Hardcore surfing magazine, says favela surfers could be among Brazil’s best. He says Buxexa, for example, has “big talent. But he doesn’t have a way to advance because of discrimination.”

Fefi is following in his brother’s footsteps, frustration and all. After participating for four years in the Surfavela Project, Fefi figures he’s good enough now to start competing in amateur tournaments.

“The problem is money for the entry fee,” he says. “If I had a sponsor, I’d already be competing.”